In response to Liam, here: from a poem about politics/"current" events/socio-economics/etc. and one of the best I've read in that vein:
from "The Book of the Dead"
These roads will take you into your own country.
Seasons and maps coming where this road comes
into a landscape mirrored in these men.
Past all your influences, your home river,
constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood,
parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.
What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theatres of war.
What two things shall never be seen?
They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean.
This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.
What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hill of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
The facts of war forced into actual grace.
Seasons and modern glory. Told in the histories,
how first ships came
seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds
lining the west horizon with their white
shining halations;
they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe –
could not be used to transform; created coast –
breathed-in America.
See how they took the land, made after-life
fresh out of exile, planted the pionneer
base and blockade,
pushed forests down in an implacable walk
west where new clouds lay at the desirable
body of sunset;
taking the seabord. Replaced the isolation,
dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater
frontier of Europe,
a moment, and another frontier held,
this land was planted home-land that we know.
Ridge of discovery,
until we walk to windows, seeing America
lie in a photograph of power, widened
before our forehead,
and still behind us falls another glory,
London unshaken, the long French road to Spain,
the old Mediterranean
flashing new signals from the hero hills
near Barcelona, monuments and powers,
parent defenses.
Before our face the broad and concrete west,
green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river
controlled and damned;
the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains
grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country
sharp in the south,
liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert,
the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen
fountains of life,
the flourished land, peopled with watercourses
to California and the colored sea;
sums of frontiers
and unmade boundaries of acts and poems,
the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,
this fact and this disease.
(Muriel Rukeyser)
. The rest of the poems in the book are solid paragraphs.
